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The Great Rosarians of the World 13 West will be held at The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, California, will be celebrated on Saturday, February 2, 2013. The program will be held from 1:00 pm to 5:00 pm in Friends’ Hall. There will be a reception following the program. Tickets are $10.00 each and reservations required. To obtain tickets please call The Huntington at 626.405.3504.

This year we are honoring two outstanding Rosarians, Dr. Walter H. Lewis and Malcolm Manners, whose work has promoted the growing of roses and extended our knowledge of roses.

Dr. Walter H. Lewis

Dr. Lewis is a world renowned rose taxonomist who has been collecting, characterizing, and publishing on species roses for over 50 years. Dr. Lewis has focused his research primarily on rose species native to North America and has contributed more to our understanding of these roses than anyone else. He earned his Ph.D. in the 1950s traveling and characterizing several North American rose species. He documented their geographical ranges and variation for morphological and cytological traits. He continues to document new and disjunct populations and report on them.

Recently Dr. Lewis completed the definitive chapter on North American species roses that will be within an upcoming volume of the Flora of North America. He has expanded his love and research for roses through graciously mentoring and encouraging other scientists. He is semi-retired now after having held joint appointments at the Missouri Botanical Garden and Washington University.

With an increased emphasis on pest resistance, drought tolerance, and winter hardiness in modern roses, species roses have come to the forefront as key sources of such traits. His research has proven of great benefit in helping breeders better recognize the traits species contain and understand their reproductive biology in order to more successfully obtain desirable hybrids.

Malcolm Manners

Dr. Malcolm Manners has been growing roses for nearly 30 years, mostly old garden roses types, but some modern roses as well. He is a Professor of Horticultural Science at Florida Southern College, where he teaches courses in general horticulture, tropical fruits, horticultural pest and diseases, plant physiology, and plant nutrition.

He was born in Pennsylvania and moved to Florida with his family when they moved when he was 11 years old. He earned the bachelor’s degree in biology and chemistry from Anderson College (Indiana), then the M.S. and Ph.D. at the University of Florida, majoring in horticulture (tropical fruit physiology). He started teaching at Florida Southern College in 1981 and has been there ever since.

Since 1984, he has managed FSC’s rose mosaic virus heat therapy program, which cures roses of virus disease and makes the healthy propagating material available to the nursery industry. In conjunction with that program, he manages a collection of approximately 200 rose varieties, in two campus gardens and the college greenhouses. Most of the certified mosaic free old garden roses now grown in the U.S. came through the Florida Southern program.

In 1990, he imported a collection of Bermuda’s “mystery roses,” and it is from FSC’s gardens that much of the U.S. stock of those roses has been propagated. He has also worked closely with molecular biologist D. Nancy Morvillo at Florida Southern, researching the relationships of various roses, especially the older Noisettes, with DNA analysis.

For the past several years, his classes have propagated roses for the New York Heritage Rose District, and on two occasions, he took groups of FSC students to New York to help plant the roses and train children in propagation techniques.

He serves as a trustee of the Heritage Rose Foundation, and has served on the American Rose Society’s committees on rose registrations and rose classification, and the old garden rose committee. He is also active in the Central Florida Heritage Rose Society.

In addition to teaching horticulture in the USA, he frequently volunteers through USAID’s Farmer-toFarmer program, training growers of fruits and other crops in some of the world’s poorest regions.

Please join us in celebrating the work of these two Great Rosarians on Saturday, February 2, 2013, at The Huntington from 1:00 pm to 5:00 pm.

Tickets are $10.00 each and reservations required. To obtain tickets please call The Huntington at 626.405.3504.